“Where’s all your stuff?” I said. “Where are your books and things?”
He looked around like he hadn’t noticed, like he was trying to remember what was missing.
“They came looking for you,” he said. “They came here yesterday, or the day before.”
“Who did?”
“They did. The social.”
“What did they say to you?”
“Did you speak to anyone downstairs?” he asked me. “Did you see anyone? They’re looking out for you.”
I shook my head. I told him no.
“Be careful,” he said. “They mustn’t catch you in here.”
“They won’t.”
“You can’t be here,” he said. “I’m not allowed,” and I could see that something in him had died. Some vital part of him was long dead.
“Not allowed to see me? But you didn’t do anything!” I told him. “What did you do?”
Tears were pouring down Grandad’s face. I wanted to kill them, whoever did this to him, whoever it was that ended him up like that.
“Why didn’t you just tell them?” I said.
He didn’t answer me.
“Why didn’t you just say you were my grandad and come and get me?”
Grandad looked at me then, and a little of the man I’d known peered out from his frightened, water-logged eyes.
“Why did you leave me there?” I said. “What did I do?”
“Chap,” he said. “I can’t lie to you any more.”
“Lie about what?”
“I’m not your grandad,” he said.
I thought I would choke. He might as well have put his cold, gnarled hands tight round my throat and squeezed.
If he wasn’t my grandad, then who was he? And who was I?
“Don’t say that,” I told him. “Don’t say that to me. That’s what they said and I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen to them, Grandad.”
He shook his head at me. “You have to listen,” Grandad said. “And I have to tell you. I owe you that much. It’s the truth.”
NINETEEN
“I’ve always been on my own,” said Grandad. “I lived with my parents, in that house, all my life, and then when they died I carried on living there by myself.”
I listened to him while the fireworks screamed and burst outside and I watched him, this old man who was everything to me, who was all I’d ever had in the world and who was trying to tell me different.
“I never had a wife or children,” he said. “I never had a friend really. I had colleagues at work, conversations. One or two people used to nod and say hello to me in the library. I’d look forward to that.” He smiled. “It used to be the highlight of my day.”
He was shy, that’s what he was trying to say. He was a certified, fully qualified, totally reluctant loner. Not just a bit awkward at a party. Crippled with shyness. Grandad didn’t go out after work, not ever. He rushed home from school to see his mother, as if he was still a child, not a teacher. She was his best friend and the only person he could talk to. Their talks were fluent and easy. Perhaps she wanted him all to herself so she never taught him how to be around people, she only taught him how to be around her. That’s what Grandad thought after she left him. He was forty-six when she died, forty-six and friendless and a virgin, someone else’s cruel and lonely joke.
School was hard without her waiting for him when he got home. Teaching was hard. His health unravelled. The children seemed increasingly bored and unruly, and even the other teachers laughed slyly at his hair and his waistcoats, at his awkward, stilted ways. He left before they asked him to leave.
His father, who didn’t talk much, and who had always made it clear he’d never liked him, retreated to a room at the top of the house and hardly came down. And then one day even he was gone.
“Why are you telling me this?” I said. I remember my voice sounded raw and alarmingly vicious in that little room.
He didn’t answer. I think once he’d started he couldn’t stop. He just kept on.
After his dad died, Grandad tried for a little while to be out in the world, but nobody noticed. How do you make your first ever friend when you’re fifty-three and your own voice makes you nervous, and you’re losing your hair and everything you think and say and do belongs to another century, belongs to another time altogether? How do you stop and talk when nobody else is stopping, when everyone else has things to do and places to be? No one has the time to be pleasant to a strange old man who dresses like a funeral director and speaks like Charles Dickens. Everyone is far too busy for that.
He had money to live on and books to read. He discovered good whisky. He locked himself away, too scared to do anything else, too old to start learning. He must have been the loneliest man in London. I picture him now, on his own desert island, right in the middle of a whole sea of people. He couldn’t get off it because he just didn’t know how.
“And then one night,” he said, glancing at me, “after I’d been alone in my house for a very long time, somebody knocked on my door.”
He was making sure I was still with him, still listening. Where else would I be? What else would I be doing? I couldn’t move, apart from anything else. I didn’t have anywhere to go.
“A young woman and a little lad,” he said, kick-starting my dread. “A girl and a boy.”
Their voices were loud in the empty quiet of his house. There hadn’t been voices in there for years. Grandad couldn’t cope with the sound of her, the boy’s high wailing. He put his hands over his ears.
“I’m in trouble,” she said, even louder. “I’m in deep shit. Let me in. Let us in, please.”
The boy was soot-black and filthy. The girl’s hair was burnt. He could smell it. He stood at the door, paralysed by shyness and indecision.
She made his mind up for him. She pushed past him, dragging the little boy by the wrist and they cowered in his hallway, cowered from the outside, from the rain and the sirens and the acrid fire smell that Grandad was only just beginning to notice, that he was only now aware of.
“I think I just burned a house down,” she said, not to him, not to anyone, just into the air in the hall. He shut the door behind them.
“Don’t tell,” the girl said, starting to shiver. “Don’t tell anyone or I will come back and cut you while you’re sleeping.”
Grandad said the only thing he could think of, the thing he was supposed to, the thing he’d been practising to a shut and guestless door for twenty years.
“Hello,” he said. “Do come in, and make yourselves at home.”
So they did.
He didn’t have a TV. He didn’t listen to the radio or buy a newspaper or join in in any way with what was going on outside his house. The girl complained about it. She said it was the most boring half-dead dump she’d ever been in.
She was lucky. She would slap anyone who said it, and she’d have every right to, but it was true. Because if Grandad had known what was going on, if he had known that a girl and a two-year-old boy were missing, feared dead, in a fire in a council-run care home three streets away, things might have been very different.
The girl wasn’t very good company. She set up camp in a room on the top floor, just like his father, and she wouldn’t tell him her name.
“No questions,” she said, “or I’m gone.” And he didn’t want her to go, so he didn’t ask any.
She ate his food and drank his tea and smoked the cigarettes he bought for her. He assumed she was the boy’s mother, because they had arrived together and because the boy wailed if he was ever far from her side. She was young, but she was old enough and she knew enough, she’d seen enough. Even Grandad could tell that, by the flint in her eyes, by the spark in them when she told the boy to leave her alone, to go and play in the traffic, when she locked her door against his wheedling and banished him downstairs.
“I remember the first time you came to my room,” Grandad said, and I couldn’t look at him. “You liked the fire and the clocks. You
touched all the books on the shelf. You climbed up in an armchair and sat down and smiled.”
The anger began at the edges, at the ends of my fingers and toes. I thought it was just cold. I remember underneath all the hurt and confusion, this rational voice in my head saying, It’s cold in here. Stamp your feet. Rub your hands together. Listen.
Grandad went on talking. He said I was plump and shining underneath the soot. He said I was resiliently cheerful and curious and self-contained. He said, “I think you knew more about life than I did when you were only two.”
“Who was I?” I asked him, the cold spreading to my limbs, the rage spreading. “Who am I?”
“You’re Chap,” he said. “You were always just the little chap to me.”
“What did she call me?” I said. “What did my mother call me?”
Grandad shook his head. “She called you Damiel,” he said. “She called you a lot of things. But she wasn’t your mother.”
I was like Alice falling down the black hole, not knowing when it would end. I could feel myself falling.
The girl disappeared, apparently. She left with £100 of Grandad’s money, found in a biscuit tin in the kitchen. She said she was going. She at least told him that. He found that he was disappointed, no, devastated even. He realised that the few weeks and months they’d been messing up his house and taking advantage of him had been amongst the happiest in his life. She was on her way out of the door when he realised it, her face set like concrete, her hair washed and combed and shining.
“What about the boy, the little chap?” he said. “Where’s your son? Can’t I say goodbye?”
“Keep him,” the girl said. “He’s not my son. He’s nobody’s son as far as I can tell. That’s why he attached himself to me.”
I didn’t cry when she was gone. Grandad gave me a bath and put me to bed and read me a book and sat up all night watching me sleep. I was as good as gold. I was the same the next night, he said, and the next, and all the ones after that.
“You were never any trouble,” he said. “You brought me nothing but joy.”
“You should have told someone,” I said, the fury settling now on my chest.
“You slept like an angel,” he said. “You woke up smiling. I made you hot milk and you drank it and twirled your hair and smiled at me with your pink apple cheeks.”
I couldn’t look at him. I stared out of the window at the littered black sky.
“I loved you,” he said. “I taught you to read. I taught you to cook. I taught you how to be free and independent and confident, the opposite of me.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t speak to him.
“Chap,” he said. “I love you.”
It erupted then, the anger, it poured itself out into the room like lava.
“Who’s Chap?” I said, and the catch in my voice was bitter, caustic.
“You are.”
“Or Damiel? Is that who I am?”
“Yes.”
“Or nobody?”
“Not nobody.”
“NOBODY!” I yelled. “NOBODY and NOTHING!”
“Chap,” he said, “Don’t—”
I don’t remember what I said to Grandad, not exactly, not word for word. I was blind with it. I was thrown into this void and there was only him to scream at, only him to hate. I let him have it, I know that much. I said he’d taken my life from me. I said he’d stolen everything.
“Where’s my family?” I said. “Where have you hidden them? Who am I?”
I said I was nobody because of him, thanks to him, a lonely, bitter, selfish, sick old man.
“I hate you,” I said, inches from his face, while he cowered in his chair, defenceless, remorseful and defeated. I saw my spit land on his cheek. I saw the fear in his eyes, the fear that I would hit him, the half-hope that I might. I hated him with everything I had. I told him so. And then I walked out of his sad and filthy little cell and took the stairs down three at a time and went out into the fireworks, into the night. I never saw Grandad again.
It was twenty-five past seven. I asked the man. I was nobody. That’s when it began.
TWENTY
Frank came back in the middle of the night. I lay on my bed, on top of the covers, exhausted and fully awake, still dressed in my mud-stained clothes. I heard him. He drove slowly into the yard with his lights off. He killed the engine and sat in his car. There was a long quiet space between the engine cutting and the sound of his door opening and closing. He tried to shut it without making too much noise.
Was he being considerate, trying not to wake us? Or was he slipping in unnoticed, and coming back to get me?
He came inside with quiet care. The keys jangled slightly in the lock, the bolt scraped a little when he turned it. I heard the dog’s tail hitting against something while it wagged. I heard Frank’s voice and I heard the dog groan with friendly disappointment. Frank took his shoes off and placed them neatly at the bottom of the stairs. I could picture him doing it.
I lay there rigid with fear, tuned to the slightest movement, the smallest noise. His feet whispered on the steps and along the hall and stopped outside my door. I’d wedged it shut with a chair. I’d barricaded myself in.
The water was still in the bath, stone cold and dead still. Frank’s clothes were still on the floor. I hadn’t left the bathroom until Edie and Helen gave up on me. I didn’t leave it until I knew they were both asleep.
I think Frank and I both heard each other on either side of that door. I think each of us knew the other one was listening.
I’m not sure how long he stood there. Time stopped. I couldn’t rely on time any more. He sighed softly and went into his room, shut the door. I heard him barricade himself in too, I heard the definite click of the key in the lock.
I stayed awake all night. I wondered if he slept.
In the morning, before any of them were up, I took Edie’s phone from the kitchen table and I called Floyd.
It was pretty early. I knew I’d wake him.
“Who is this?” he said.
“It’s Cassiel.”
“No it isn’t. No you aren’t. Who is this?”
I thought he couldn’t hear me properly. I went outside for a better signal.
“Why did you tell me to say that to Frank?” I said. “What did it mean?”
I could hear him moving, sitting up in bed. “How did he take it?” he said. “What did he do?”
“He didn’t like it. It scared him. He changed. It scared me. What’s going on, Floyd?”
“Meet me,” he said. “Meet me down at the warren again.”
I asked him if I could trust him.
“No,” he said. “You can’t. You can’t trust anyone.”
I looked at my reflection in the wet, clouded kitchen windows, blew the air out from my cheeks.
“Are you coming?” he said.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said. “I’m walking there now.”
“Look over your shoulder,” Floyd told me. “Keep an eye out for Frank on the way down.”
“Why?”
“You’re not safe any more,” he said. “That’s why.”
Floyd was there before me. There was nobody else but us. The Wicker Man had grown. His legs and belly were there, stretched out on the grass, like he was lying down, the two-thirds of him that existed.
“We’ll stay out here,” Floyd said, “in the open, so we can see who’s coming.”
“Are you serious?” I said, but I knew he was.
I flicked a stone into the river. It skipped six times and then bubbled under. The water was fast and angry and loud.
“What’s going on, Floyd?” I said.
“You know,” he said.
“Why did you tell me to say that to Frank? Why am I suddenly in danger?”
Floyd picked up a handful of stones and let them drop. “You might be,” he said. “And you might not.”
“What’s all this about?” I asked him.
“You’re
not Cassiel,” he said.
The last stone dropped from his hand with a clap. All I could hear was the water and the wind in the trees and the sound of Floyd, waiting.
“What?” I said.
“I know you’re not Cassiel,” he said, looking right at me. “And I know that Frank knows it too.”
I didn’t argue. I didn’t bother. Floyd was utterly certain, I could tell that, and he was right. I dropped to a crouch at the river’s edge, one hand on my head, one hand in the cold wet. I didn’t say anything.
“You look so like him,” he said. “It’s extraordinary really.”
“What happens next?” I said.
His eyes and his voice were hard like set clay. “I want to know some things.”
“Like what?”
“Like are you really not him?” he said. “Is it really not you?”
“It’s not me,” I said, and then I laughed at the sound of it.
“Then who are you?”
I told Floyd that didn’t matter. I told him I wasn’t anyone. I felt that old, familiar hollow where that knowledge should be. I felt the lack of my own family just as keenly as ever.
“It does matter,” he said.
“Doesn’t mean I can change it,” I said. “I’m nobody. That’s just a fact.”
He didn’t have an answer to that.
“Why would you do such a thing?” Floyd said. “Why would you pretend to be Cassiel?” I ignored the question. He asked it again. “Why would you do that?”
I waited a minute before I answered. I just enjoyed the gaggle of water on stones and the noise of birds and the open space. I enjoyed Floyd standing next to me, like we were just two friends out for a walk.
“It just happened,” I said. “I didn’t know how to stop it.”
Floyd shook his head slowly, the look on his face half smiling, half stricken. “How does something like that just happen?” he said.
I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to stay and I wanted to run at the same time.
“You are so like him,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“You’re so like him, I can still almost believe you are him,” he said.
“Well, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not him. I just wished I was.”
The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight Page 13
